Two aspects of yesterday’s bomb blasts in Hyderabad worry me. The first has to do with the identity of the bombers. Judging by past experience, it is probably fair to say that Indian investigators will not do a lot of detective work. In the case of previous attacks, various police forces have competed with each other to arrest the men they believe are responsible, without doing any investigation to actually determine guilt or responsibility. Read more

Watching the tributes on TV and reading the newspaper comments, anybody who did not know much about Bal Thackeray could be forgiven for thinking that two different people had died. One was a Marathi-speaking avatar of Adolf Hitler. And the other was a Bombay-bred version of Mother Teresa. Read more

Many months ago Saif Ali Khan phoned and asked if we could meet to discuss a movie he was planning. I’ve known Saif for a long time largely because of my friendship with his parents, the elegant Sharmila Tagore and the late Tiger Pataudi, the classiest guy I have ever known. Plus, it helped that for many years we lived in the same building in Bombay. Read more

There is a famous story about a reporter for the Indian Express’ Bombay edition in the 1980s. Asked to perform that most-boring of all tasks, report on an eclipse, he dashed off his copy within a few minutes and without waiting for the eclipse. Read more